Navigating the Safari Toolbar in Mac OS X Lion

In Mac OS X Lion, the buttons along the top of the window in Safari (the toolbar) do pretty much what their names imply. From left to right, these buttons are

Back/Forward: When you open a page and then move to a second page (or third or fourth), the Back button takes you to a previously visited page. Remember that you need to go back before the Forward button will work.

Add This Page (+): When you find a page of interest or a page you know you’ll want to remember, click this button to tell Safari to remember it for you in Lion’s cool new Reading List or as a Bookmark.

To the right of the Add This Page button is the Address field. This is where you type web addresses, or URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), that you want to visit. Just type one and press Return to surf to that site.

But there’s more in OS X Lion. To add other useful buttons to your toolbar, choose View→Customize Toolbar (or right-click anywhere in the toolbar and choose Customize Toolbar from the contextual menu). The Customize Toolbar sheet drops down, and you can drag items into or out of the toolbar to create your own custom set of buttons.

Web addresses almost always begin with http://www. But Safari has a cool trick: If you just type a name, you usually get to the appropriate web site that way without typing http, //, or www. If you type apple in the Address field and then press Return, for example, you go to www.apple.com.

Below the Address field is the Bookmark Bar, already populated with some buttons of web pages Apple thinks you might enjoy, including Apple, Yahoo!, Google Maps, YouTube, and Wikipedia.

The News and Popular buttons are actually drop-downmenus. You can tell by the little black triangles after their names.